SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 14 April 1989
Page 29
CLR
Artist as Revolutionary Paul Buhle, Verso £22.95 Hardback, £7.90 Paperback
Reviewed by Charlie Van Gelderen.
NOW IN HIS 88th year, CLR James has lived to become a legend in his own time. His home in Brixton has become a focus for radicals from all over the world. In his youth in Trinidad, James became known in cricketing circles as a maverick. This term could also be used to describe his impact on Marxism.
It is a pity that James has never completed his memoirs or expanded them into an autobiography. Even given his not undeserved self esteem, his fluent pen could not fail to do better justice to its subject than the book under review, by the author of the unsatisfactory Marxism in the USA.
From an early age,
CLR developed
wide-spread interests —a
passion for cricket.
Shakespeare, Verdi and
Beethoven and a growing
involvement in politics.
Now an octagenarian.
with a world-wide reputation, he is still as
interested in these
divergent spheres. In the
semi-autohiographical
Beyond the Boundary, he
argues that sport, and
especially cricket, art and
politics are dialectically
inter-related.
It was his observations on the
cricket field which first
awakened him to the injustices
of colonial rule in his native
Trinidad. Mediocre white
Javers were chosen for the
Vest Indian team simply
because they were white.
Oustanding players, like Wilton
St Hill, were left out because
they were black.
But James political and
wider literary life really began
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Cricket, art and politics are dialectically inter-related
when he moved to England in 1932, settling in Nelson. Lancashire and earing his living as cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. Swiftly disilusioned with the Labour Party, he joined the ILP in 1933, where he came into contact with the trotskyist Marxist Group, In an interview with Al Richardson and others. published by Socialist Platform in 1987, James states quite frankly "1 joined the Trotskyist movement and I leamed marxism in the Trotskyist
CLR James as he is today
movement. This is not at all apparent from Buhle's account, which gives the impression that James was already a fully- fledged marxist at this point.
James rose to prominence at the time of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia). His articles in the TIP joumal New Leader were models of marxist pamphleteering, linking the anti-imperialist and class struggles in dialectic unity. He
had been a marxist for only three short years, but quickly grasped its casentials. Thanks to his carly contact with trotskysim, James, unlike his old friend George Padmore, avoided falling into the stalinist trap.
Buhle fails completely to mention James participation in the founding conference of the Fourth International or the 1936 Geneva conference which
preceded it. Indeed the Fourth
Intemational is not mentioned once in the book.
Further, he ignores what was a formative experience for James
— his active role in combatting the vicious stalinist campaign of slander against Trotsky and trotskyists which reached its
frenzied peak during the
Moscow trials of 1936-8. James
was probably the finest orator
our movement has produced, at
least in the English speaking
world - and the movement
made full use of his talents. In
Britain he was the one person
feared by the stalinists as being
more than a match for people
such as Pollitt and Palme Dutt.
James was to develop serious
differences with Trotsky -
some of which were already
pparent in his World Revolution
917-1936: The Rise and Fall o
the Communist International
(1937). But it was his grasp of
the theory of permanent
revolution which enabled him to
write his magnus opus The Black
Jacobins, the history of the first
sucessful slave revolt since
Spartacus. If he had never
produced anthing else, socialist
literature would be richer for this
tour de force.
In the field of theory, James"
most notable contribution was
his influence, together with Trotsky himself, in tuming the American Socialist Workers Party towards a realisation of the importance of the black proletariat to the revolutinanry process in the United States. James and Raya Dunayevskaya (Johnson-Forest) were aiso amongst the first to see the revolutionary potential of the then still incipient women's movement.
James also played a role in the development of Kwame Nkrumah, to whom he was introduced by Dunayevskaya. Realising Nkrumah's leadership abilities, he sent him to George Padmore for political training- By this time, Padmore had almost completely abandoned marxism for Pan-African nationalism. As a result
Nkrumah's radical nationalism ran up against the stone wall of
neo-colonialism. When
Nkrumah's regime entered the
path of bureaucratic
degeneration and personality
cult, James did not hestitate. to
break with him and publish his
criticism.
This is not the place to debate
James differences with
trotskyism. Today James still
considers himself a leninist —
although he abjures the leninist
concept of the vanguard party.
Despite our differences with
him, he is one of the few people
alive today that has enriched
marxist theory with original
thought. In the opinion of the
reviewer, who has continued to
value his personal friendship.
there was a place for him and his
radical thoughts in the Fourth
Intemational. We are all the
poorer for his departure.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 14 April 1989